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Honest Charlie
We just want to welcome Juan to my home town, Chicago. It is a great deal changed in some respects, but quite the same in others. I suspect he will find out what that means we he arrives and settles in.
We are not going to rehash last year's idiocy here, but present excerpts from Juan's speeches. There is also a link at the end so if you wish you can connect to the site and listen to or see the other speeches, or this show, or save it to disk, tape, or thumb drive to listen to at your leisure. Capital forces attempted to take over this show or program over a decade ago, but an overwhelming uprising against that was swelling to the extent that those forces realized that they were only increasing the show's popularity and Amy gives a quick history of its expansion.
While the show continued unabated with Amy, somehow Juan was banned from the building and so the program moved to a firehouse, just a few blocks away from the 9-11 attacks which she covered uninterrupted. Juan was, of course, now allowed to be on the air again. (No sense taking further chances, old chap.)
Here is a transcript of the entire program, Amy speaking first:
In a Democracy Now! special broadcast, we spend the hour with our own Juan González, who recently gave three "farewell" speeches in his hometown of New York before he moved to Chicago. González is an award-winning journalist and investigative reporter who spent 29 years as a columnist for the New York Daily News. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award and author of many books, including the classic "Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America," which has just been reissued and published in Spanish. His other books include "News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media." González is also the founder and past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Before beginning his career in journalism, he spent several years as a Latino community and civil rights activist, helping to found and lead the Young Lords Party during the late 1960s. He has also been the co-host of Democracy Now! since it started in 1996, and is continuing to co-host the show from his new home in Chicago. In the first part of our special, we feature his address in November at the Columbia Journalism School reflecting on "Forty Years of Fighting for Racial and Social Justice in Journalism."
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: In this special broadcast, we spend the hour with our own Juan González. He recently gave three major farewell speeches in his hometown of New York, before moving to Chicago. Juan González is an award-winning journalist and investigative reporter who spent 29 years as a columnist for the New York Daily News. He's a two-time winner of the George Polk Award, as well as many others, and author of many books, including the classic Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, which has just been reissued and also published in Spanish. His other books include News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. Juan is founder and past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Before beginning his career in journalism, he spent several years as a Latino community and civil rights activist, helping to found and lead the Young Lords during the late '60s. Juan González has also been co-host of Democracy Now! since we began in 1996, more than a quarter of a century ago. He's continuing to co-host the show from his new home in Chicago.
We begin today with the address he gave in late November at the Columbia Journalism School, reflecting on 40 years of fighting for racial and social justice in journalism.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As some of you know, mine has not been your typical journalism career. I've been grappling now for more than 50 years — initially as an activist, then for decades as a journalist and a student of history — with the burning issue of how oppressed and marginalized people can best create and disseminate a narrative that truly reflects their lives, not just accepting the simple-minded, stereotypical and often denigrating narratives of them fashioned by those with greater power and wealth, but instead offering a fuller and more accurate picture of who they are, of their passion and their pain, their achievements and failures, their hopes and their dreams. Because of my insistence on this approach, throughout my career, I was labeled by many of my colleagues in the commercial media as a, quote, "advocacy journalist," as if that was somehow a distinct and less developed form of real journalism, some outlier. But more about that in a minute.
That I ended up a reporter, and a radical activist to boot, you can chalk up to Ms. Bonagura, to the 1968 Columbia student strike and to the Young Lords. One gave me the skills. The other two, the two gave me the mind and the heart.
Pauline Bonagura was the one public school teacher every kid dreams of. She was the English and journalism instructor at Franklin K. Lane High School in East New York, Brooklyn. If you haven't been outside of New York City, you'd have never heard of East New York until the new show that just came out. Young, charismatic and relentless, she had a hopeless love affair with the English language and was determined all her students would master not only grammar and writing, but the art of reporting. The number of fine journalists she produced is remarkable. David Vidal, who for years was a foreign correspondent from The New York Times; Steve Handelman, who worked for decades for the Toronto Star; Carole Carmichael, who was an editor for years, managing editor at The Seattle Times; Janet McMillan, a sterling reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer — all of us were Bonagura's students.
She plucked me, a shy kid from a working-class Puerto Rican family in the Cypress Hills projects of East New York, and decided that I would be editor of the Lane Reporter, the paper that she advised, the paper that almost every year won top prizes from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. And that probably had a lot to do with my eventually getting into Columbia College on a full scholarship.
My activism, of course, began right here on Morningside Heights as a Columbia undergrad. On April 23rd, 1968, in the midst of the Vietnam War, and only weeks after Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis, touching off a stunning series of urban rebellions in America, right here on this campus hundreds of Columbia and Barnard students occupied and barricaded several buildings. We did so to protest the university's arrogant and racist land expansion onto Morningside Heights and the Harlem neighborhoods and to achieve an end to the university's research for the military in Vietnam.
I was a senior at the time, first in my family to attend college. Somehow I emerged as one of the leaders of our Student Strike Coordinating Committee, which is how I came to know and befriend many of the young 1960s radicals who would go on to considerable notoriety: SDS leaders Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn, Tom Hayden, David Gilbert, Kathy Boudin, Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, the great civil rights lawyers Gerry Lefcourt and William Kunstler.
Our initial weeklong protest ended with a brutal police assault on the campus, where more than 700 of us were arrested, more than a hundred people injured and hospitalized, including several professors, all of which provoked of massive student boycott of classes that paralyzed the university for the rest of the semester, that reverberated across the nation at other college campuses, and that soon resulted in the resignation of Columbia President Grayson Kirk and the university provost, David Truman.
A year later, I helped found the Young Lords Organization in East Harlem, the neighborhood where I had originally grown up. The Lords were a loud, brash, rebellious and talented group who sought to defend the Puerto Rican migrant community from systemic discrimination and to end our homeland's colonial status. For a few brief years, we became a thorn in the side of the establishment and the police in this town and cities throughout the East Coast with our many occupations of institutions and militant actions against police abuse. And in the process, we inspired a generation of young Latinos to demand more equitable treatment.
We focused not only on the concrete bread-and-butter issues of more traditional community organizers — better schools, better healthcare, better city services — but we also, in the mold of other organizations, like the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Afrika, openly espoused socialist ideals and militant internationalism, refusing to fight in the Vietnam War, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, seeking solidarity with liberation wars against Western imperialism in Africa and Latin America.
We not only created our own bilingual newspaper, Palante, our own weekly radio show on community radio station WBAI, we consciously sought to shape how the commercial media covered our actions and ideas. As a result, the Lords emerged as one of the few 1960s revolutionary groups that received considerable sympathetic coverage in the mainstream press.
This was no accident. It had everything to do with understanding storytelling. Our minister of information, Pablo "Yoruba" Guzmán, who was only 19 when we started, had studied, while as a student at Bronx High School of Science, one of the visionary media scholars of that era, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. Pablo had quickly digested the essence of McLuhan's remarkable critique, that every mass medium touches the human brain in a different manner, that every medium acts on us not primarily through the words or images it conveys, but through the way it connects to our brain and triggers our emotions. McLuhan, of course, famously proclaimed that, quote, "The media are extensions of human beings," that the "content" of a medium, he once wrote, "is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind." Pablo then consciously worked to shape a distinct message for each medium that we dealt with — newspapers, radio, TV.
McLuhan, of course, was writing long before the creation of the internet, the World Wide Web, and the smartphone, advances that only further confirmed his pioneering theories. Think about it. What is more important today, the actual content of any message or video we receive on our smartphone, or the fact that the device itself has become the most indispensable instrument of modern society, tying us to the outside world? And through it, not only are we in constant contact with our family, friends, employers, and even total strangers, but unseen forces are constantly tracking us, surveilling our thoughts and wants, our every search, our every action, everywhere we go.
Even as youngsters, we in the Lords understood the power of the media, and we consciously cultivated that good coverage. We were helped by the first brilliant crop of young Black and Latino reporters in the city's press, to whom Pablo fed exclusives, and who in turn repaid us with more sympathetic coverage than their white colleagues — people like a young Ed Bradley at WCBS, like Gil Noble at WABC, like Gloria Rojas at WNBC, Rudy Garcia at the Daily News — and, of course, white writers like Jack Newfield at The Village Voice.
Shaping the narrative, however, does not simply involve good stories. To be done well, it requires a deep connection, a virtual fusion, between the storytellers and the subjects of their stories.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan González, reflecting on 40 years for fighting for racial and social justice in journalism. Stay tuned for more of his speech.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We're spending the hour with Democracy Now! co-host Juan González. We continue with his recent address at the Columbia Journalism School, reflecting on his 40 years of fighting for racial and social justice in journalism.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: My first job in journalism was at the Philadelphia Daily News in 1978. I started as a general assignment reporter. Before my rookie year was up, the Iran hostage crisis had erupted. And I'll never forget being in the newsroom one day and going to the bulletin board, where employees posted all kinds of information on things for sale and other things of interest, and there was a petition on the bulletin board by many of the reporters at the Philadelphia Daily News, an open letter to the White House demanding that if the hostages were harmed, that we should nuke Tehran. These were intelligent reporters in a major metropolitan newspaper openly saying we should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran to solve the crisis that we were facing. So, of course, I was shocked, to say the least.
So, I went in to my editor-in-chief. I was just a young reporter at the time, and the editor-in-chief had taken a liking to me. And I said, "You have a policy of allowing a reporter to submit an opinion piece for the paper. I want to submit an opinion piece to counter this thing on the bulletin board. I want to write a column, 'Send the shah back,'" because that was what the whole Iran crisis was about, that the shah of Iran, illegally imposed upon the Iranian people as a result of a CIA-backed coup in 1953, had been overthrown by the masses of Iranians and had fled to the United States, and the Iranians were demanding that he be returned to be held to trial, held to justice. And that was what the hostage crisis was about. And so, I wrote the opinion piece, and the editor-in-chief calls me in, and he says, "You know, you hit us kind of hard. But I'm going to run your piece. I'm going to run your piece. It's well written, but I'm telling you, it's not easy." That was my first understanding that it was possible to challenge the dominant narrative, even in the commercial media, and at times have some kind of success.
About a year later, I had been part of a group that had helped in the Puerto Rican community, that had built an organization called the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights. And at its founding convention, they elected me president of the organization. Now, it was a volunteer organization. And it was basically involved in issues around the Puerto Rican community at the time. I had gone from general assignment to becoming a labor reporter at the Philadelphia Daily News. But the editor-in-chief calls me in again. He says, "I can't have that. I can't have my reporters writing news during the day, and then in the evening or in their spare time being involved in activist causes." And I said, "Well, that's funny, because didn't you just have Tom Cooney, our top writer, write all the lead stories about the pope's visit to Philadelphia? Do you know that Tom Cooney is the president of the Holy Name Society of his church? He's a devout Catholic. He's active in the Catholic Church. And you have no problem with him covering the pope. But you're telling me that I cannot be active when I'm not even covering the Puerto Rican or the Latino community." So, the editor says to me, "Well, I'm firm on this. You either resign from this organization or we're going to have to let you go." So, I was — I just started out in my career. I figured, "What can I do?"
So, luckily, I had a mentor who helped me quite a bit, a magnificent gentleman by the name of Charles Sumner Stone, Chuck Stone, the dean of Black journalists in Philadelphia. Chuck Stone had been a Tuskegee Airman. He had been the speechwriter for Adam Clayton Powell when Adam Clayton Powell was a congressman. He had been the editor of The Chicago Defender before he became a senior editor and a columnist at the Philadelphia Daily News. So Chuck Stone wasn't afraid of anything. And Chuck pulled me aside, and he said, "Juan, don't be intimidated, first of all. Second, document everything. Always keep a record of everything you do in your correspondence with those in power, because you may need that at some point or another." And then he said, "Check the union contract." I said, "The union contract?"
So I checked the contract of the Newspaper Guild. And there was a clause in the Newspaper Guild contract that said that if a member of the guild had been elected to a public office or an office of public responsibility for a term up to four years, that they could request a leave of absence and then get their job back. So, in other words, this thing had been fought over years ago, years before we even became reporters, and there had already been a solution fashioned to deal with the question of social activism and social participation of journalists and reporters. So, I went in to my editor, and I said, "I'm invoking this clause of the union contract. I'm requesting a leave of absence to fulfill my term as president. Then I expect to be able to get my job back." And so, I was able to get my job back. But it was another lesson that the battle over activism and within journalism is a long-running battle.
Thankfully, my experiences in the Lords and my own readings had strengthened my growing belief that the commercial media were not the entire universe of the press in America. I've managed to work not only in mainstream or commercial journalism, but proudly, and almost simultaneously, in the alternative and the dissident press, for the past 26 years as co-host with Amy Goodman a marvelous show, Democracy Now!, and at various times, as well, in the Spanish-language press.
When I started at Democracy Now! in 1996, there were just three of us: Amy, myself and a producer. And the show was just on a handful of Pacifica stations. And my colleagues in the commercial media would say, "What are you doing with that crazy left-wing show?" But both its audience and its influence has steadily grown over the years, to the point that we are now one of the major sources of dissident news coverage in America, and DN! now is on 1,300 stations not only in the U.S. but throughout Latin America, several hundred in Latin America, more than a million followers on social media, and a full-time staff of 30 people, state-of-the-art studios in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, and one of the few organizations that consistently covers international news. All of that started from just a few people who were convinced that there was another way to tell the news narratives in this country.
In my 2012 book, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, my co-author Joe Torres and I examined in depth the historic conflicts and interplay between these three distinct and separate streams of the media: the commercial press, the alternative or dissident press, and the press by people of color — each of which have a long history in this country. And there's been a constant narrative and counternarrative between them.
The commercial press, from Publick Occurrences in 1690 with Benjamin Harris and The Boston News-Letter in 1704 through to the Pulitzer and Hearst chains, and, of course, to the modern Goliaths of our time, the CNNs, The New York Times, the Fox Newses and so forth.
But there's been a separate stream of the press in America, the radical press, from the working men's publications of the 1830s through the muckrakers of the late 19th century, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, the socialist and communist presses of the early and mid-20th century, the New Left press of the 1960s, and to the progressive blogs and news sites of today, such as Common Dreams_, ScheerPost, CounterPunch, The Intercept, Consortium News. This whole other stream of the press has been involved in a battle over narrative with the commercial and corporate press.
And there is a third stream. Because people of color were systematically excluded for 200 years from both the commercial press and the dissident and working men's press, they had to create their own voices. 1827, Freedom's Journal, John Russwurm, Samuel Cornish, the first Black newspaper in the world: "We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. … From the press and the pulpit we have suffered much by being incorrectly represented." That's March of 1827. You could write that today, and it would still have resonance. And on to great journalists like Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Ida B. Wells campaigning against lynching, or Elias Boudinot and the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper in the world, in 1828, New Echota, Georgia, to John Rollin Ridge, the Native American who founded The Sacramento Bee. A Cherokee was the founder of The Sacramento Bee, that became the basis of the McClatchy chain. The Golden Hills News, 1854, the first Chinese-language newspaper in the United States, or the work of Wong Chin Foo, founder of the Chinese American in 1883, right here in New York City. There were over 25 Chinese-language newspapers in United States before the 20th century.
There were hundreds of Spanish-speaking papers in the country. And, of course, in the Spanish-language press, there's an enormous radical tradition — not just a news tradition, a radical news tradition — from Enrique Salazar, who founded La Voz del Pueblo in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in the 1890s, to José Agustín Quintero, who founded El Ranchero in 1855 in San Antonio, to José Martí, one of the really great journalists covering the United States — he lived in New York City for 15 years and wrote for Latin American papers, some of the most unbelievably great news coverage of the United States, written in Spanish by the founding father of Cuba, José Martí — to Ricardo Flores Magón, the anarchist, with his paper, Regeneración, that was published throughout the Southwest here and was really the precursor of what became the Mexican Revolution, to Jovita Idar, the great Mexican American in Laredo, Texas, who edited La Crónica and who campaigned against the lynching of Mexicans and against the segregation of Mexican schools and of the lack of — the stealing of the land of Mexicans by the Anglo settlers, to more modern times, Jesús Colón, who for decades wrote a column for the Daily Worker, the official Communist Party paper here in the United States. He was a columnist for the Daily Worker in the 1950s. So there is a long tradition of journalists in the Latino community who not only covered the news of the community, but covered it from a radical perspective.
To get back to this issue of objectivity and what's real journalism, the fact is the press in the U.S. have always been partisan and subjective in their chronicling of reality. In fact, it was Upton Sinclair's devastating exposure of press corruption in his classic book, The Brass Check, and public revulsion over misinformation by the giant newspaper chains that gave rise in the early 1900s to journalism schools like this one and to organizations like the American Society of Newspaper Editors, that sought to establish basic standards of journalism. And it was only in the aftermath of World War II and the creation of the Hutchins Commission that any principles of fair and comprehensive coverage of news events even began to be promulgated widely or that the FCC's fairness doctrine began to be implemented.
It was Walter Lippmann, perhaps the most influential journalist of the 20th century, who first dissected the nonsense of objective journalism and first raised the issue of stereotyping in the press. As we say in our book, "It is the job of the modern journalist to witness events in the wider world and then convey those events and their meaning to the rest of us as quickly as possible. But such reports are fraught with weaknesses inherent to each reporter's own perception of reality — the subjectivity that so often springs from upbringing, education, class, race, religion and gender. The less the journalist knows about the event or the subject at hand, the more likely he or she is to produce a crude or blurred representation of it. Those reports are then further filtered by editors and publishers, who get to decide which portions of the reporter's dispatch are 'newsworthy' and will survive, and which will disappear in the editing process."
Lippman warned a hundred years ago — his book Public Opinion was written in 1922. He warned a hundred years ago of the distortions that were inherent in such a process. To quote Lippmann, "For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture." And we are deluding ourselves if we think that chronicling of events occurs in any other way.
As you can imagine, my views did not always sit well with my editors in the commercial press. And over the decades, even as I kept breaking major stories that others had ignored, and even if they conceded the accuracy of my reporting, they could not accept my advocacy bent. In fact, I must be the only reporter in mainstream journalism with an extensive rap sheet, having been arrested about a dozen times over four decades — the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s — on a variety of criminal charges — criminal trespass, contempt of court, marijuana possession, inciting to riot, draft evasion — all, except for the marijuana bust, related to political protests.
Mike McAlary often joked to me — Mike was a colleague of mine, a Pulitzer Prize winner at the New York Daily News, who died very young, in his forties. Mike often joked to me that one day he went into the old Daily News library and came across the paper's clips on my radical days. This was when papers still had massive dusty files of yellow cut-out articles stuffed into pocket folders under various subjects and names. Now, of course, you just do a Google search. And the clip folder that he found was titled "Juan González, revolutionary." But by then, someone had crossed out "revolutionary" and changed it to "Daily News columnist."
Just before 1990, Mac and I, as two star columnists at the News, were both sent, along with a reporter and a photographer, to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama. Mac and the others chose to be embedded with our military and tell their story. And I, because I was the only one who spoke Spanish and because I knew from the start that this was an illegal invasion of a country that posed no threat to the United States, made my way into the barrios of Panama City to report on the invasion's impact on the Panamanian people.
And that brings me to the issue of war, very timely issue today. Throughout the history of civilization, governments have had to justify wars to their people. How else could they get the people to send their sons and daughters to the front to fight? But in every war, at least one side is lying to its people, and quite often both are. And the press has always been essential for whipping up public hysteria for war, from the Patriot press printers of the American Revolution — Ben Franklin, Benjamin Edes, Sam Adams — to the war press of New Orleans that was the one that pushed for the U.S. to get involved in the war with Mexico, to the yellow press of the Spanish-American War, to the Committee on Public Information that spread worldwide propaganda for the First World War. All the Panama-like imperialist interventions of our country — in Nicaragua, in the Dominican Republic, in Cuba, in Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, and today, Ukraine — our commercial press inevitably rally round the flag, the press releases and the narrative of our generals and politicians, and they rarely shine light on the voices of peacemakers or even to legitimate questions raised by those opposed to our wars.
It is in time of war that journalists face their greatest challenge. And having the courage to question or oppose your own government's actions at war is the ultimate test of independent journalism. The various times I did so, during the Iran hostage crisis, during the Panama invasion, during the Iraq War, were among the most difficult periods of my career. But having been steeled by those early experiences in the Columbia strike and on the streets of East Harlem with the Lords, it was not difficult to withstand efforts to intimidate me or dismiss my reporting by those who felt they were only doing their job.
Most of my reporting, however, has not been about such weighty issues of race, war and politics, but about individuals seeking a better life and seeking some form of justice. When I began writing my column for the Daily News in 1987, I had to decide what my particular approach would be. In a city brimming with extraordinary writers — Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton, Pete Hamill, Russell Baker, Sydney Schanberg — and awash with many able young writers, my modest contribution, I decided, would be a voice from another part of New York. Not writing about outcast neighborhoods, but from them. Not simply to entertain, but to change. Not after the fact, but before it, when coverage could still make a difference. In daily news writing, time becomes both an enemy and an ally. What you lose in the chance to chisel and refine for the relative few, you gain in the opportunity to influence and energize the many.
I sought to use as many of my columns as possible to probe the injustices visited upon the powerless. Yes, the rich and the famous are also victims on occasion. But they have so many politicians, lobbyists, lawyers, gossip columnists, even editorial boards, ready to jump to their defense, that they will always do fine without my help. I preferred the desperate unknown reader who came to me because he or she has gone everywhere else and no one would listen. More often than not, I came across unexpected gems, human beings whose tragedies illuminated the landscape and whose courage hopefully inspired the reader to believe that there is indeed some greater good served by a free press than just chronically or influencing the oustering of one group of politicians by another.
So that's been my journey, a short sketch of what I tried to do with the skills Ms. Bonagura gave me, with the radical views of the world I first learned here at Columbia in the midst of the '68 strike, and with the courage and heart the Lords exemplified. And the main lesson of it all? Never stop believing a better world is possible when you dare to struggle for it, but strive to do so with the knowledge of the efforts that paved the way for you, with the humility to learn from your mistakes. And as the great Chuck Stone counseled, remember to document everything. Thank you
AND THEN:
We're spending the hour with Democracy Now!'s Juan González. He recently gave three farewell addresses in his hometown of New York, before moving to Chicago. We turn now to part of a speech he gave called "Latinos, Race and Empire." He was speaking at the CUNY Graduate Center. That's the City University of New York. Just before he spoke, New York City Councilmember Alexa Avilés presented Juan with a New York City proclamation, recognizing his remarkable achievements.
ALEXA AVILÉS: It is my true, true honor to be able to offer Juan this proclamation on behalf of the New York City Council, on behalf of every Boricua that has traversed this great city, and even the one — the city that you're going to now, which I have a little problem with, but we're gonna let you go — to say thank you, de corazón, for everything you have done. I am here because of you. We are here because of you. And we honor you, and we thank you, and we indeed love you.
And we just — on behalf — I won't read it. You can read it later. Pero, obviously, it could be a very long, long tome, because his accomplishments are just quite astounding. But we fought a little bit about how revolutionary City Council wanted to be, and we fought about words in this proclamation. And I would not have them whitewashing this proclamation. So I want you to know. Hopefully it captures your spirit. But we thank you, and we honor you. And on behalf of New York City Council, on behalf of my community, gracias de corazón.
AMY GOODMAN: That's New York City Councilmember Alexa Avilés presenting Juan with a New York City Council proclamation for his decades of contribution in New York. Then Juan gave his speech. This is an excerpt of "Latinos, Race and Empire."
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Tonight, in this final talk, "Latinos, Race and Empire," I hope to use the lens of my work in a variety of grassroots Latino organizations that fought to achieve social and racial justice, to oppose colonialism and imperialism, with a special focus on what they can teach today's generation.
In retrospect, this area was perhaps my most important life's work. It eventually led to my writing of Harvest of Empire, which, to my complete surprise, became perhaps the best-selling work in the United States on Latino history of the past 20 years. The book's main thesis is that the massive Latino presence in the United States today — more than 62 million people and growing — is a direct result of the late 19th and early 20th century penetration and pillaging of Latin America by U.S. banks, corporations and the military. Latinos, quite simply, are the harvest of the empire — an unintended harvest, for sure, but one nonetheless. Tonight's event is meant, in part, to commemorate the release earlier this year of a new and updated edition of Harvest, and also the publication, as Johanna mentioned, just a few weeks ago of the first Spanish-language translation of the book, titled La cosecha del imperio.
But there's another reason why I feel the need to speak out now, before my departure, a deep concern that an unhealthy trend has begun to take hold in recent years among some sectors of Black and Latinx progressives, especially among intellectuals and academics, a trend that needs to be challenged directly through a principled but respectful debate, one that draws vital lessons from the Latino community's long and heroic history of grassroots struggles. I'm referring to a false fixation in many progressive circles with anti-Black racism as the burning political question of the day, to the point that some well-meaning but misguided folks now claim the concept of Latinos itself or the existence of Latin America are anti-Black and white supremacist in essence.
This fixation has dovetailed perfectly with a new strategy by America's neoliberal capitalists to finance a sprawling new diversity, equity and inclusion industry — they call it DEI — in our universities, in corporate workplaces and in the foundation world, all meant to systematically coopt any movements for radical change, to further divide and deviate the masses of the people from uniting against the real source of our common oppression — American capitalism and imperialism — and to avoid any acknowledgment of the persistence of class conflicts among people of color. It is a project the philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò exposed quite exhaustively in his recent book — and I highly recommend the book — Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else).
We who founded the New York Young Lords more than 50 years ago also confronted and rejected similar efforts. I've often been amazed how the image and actions of the Lords as militant revolutionaries continue to spark enduring fascination among young activists, yet too often the content of what we stood for gets lost.
It was July 26, 1969. A few dozen of us, most barely out of our teens, gathered together in Tompkins Square Park in purple berets and green field jackets and announced to the world that the Young Lords were here, determined to become the Puerto Rican arm of a social revolution that was then sweeping the world. I was 21 then, barely the oldest member of the original Central Committee. The average age of our membership was 17.
Over the next few years, we astonished ourselves and everyone around us with what we managed to accomplish, how we freed our minds, taught ourselves history and politics, changed our ways of relating to each other, forced those in power to respond to our community's demands for systemic change, how we consciously shaped and controlled our own narrative through our own newspaper, Palante, our own radio show on WBAI, and our deft handling of the commercial and corporate press. In almost no time, we awakened an entire generation of young Latinos. I have always felt immensely privileged to have been part of this most talented, dedicated and committed group of people, at all levels, not just leadership, and still marvel at how young we were when we did all these things, how fearless in the face of all those who were older and more skeptical, who kept telling us we wouldn't accomplish much.
For a brief period, we naively believed nothing could stop us, that a revolution was around the corner. Then came the reaction by those in power, as it always does — the police repression, the COINTELPRO campaigns of the Nixon era, the sectarianism and infighting that weakened us from within and turned us against each other, all of it made worse by our own youthful arrogance, a conceit fueled by all the initial success and all the fawning media attention that went to our heads. Mao Zedong called that death by "sugar-coated bullets." That was followed by the counterrevolution of the Reagan-Bush era, all-out attempts to bury the memory of everything that radical groups like the Young Lords or the Black Panthers or Los Siete or La Raza Unida or SNCC represented.
But it wasn't just the daring actions of the Lords that are important to remember — our garbage offensives, our healthcare programs, our occupations of institutions, our confrontations with the police who were terrorizing our neighborhoods, our organizing of prison inmates to demand better conditions, our protests advocating for Puerto Rican and Black studies programs at the universities. Even more significant was our analysis of race, class and empire, an analysis that stemmed from the very composition of our group. We were, after all, the sons and daughters of working-class migrants from the U.S.'s largest colonial territory. Long before decoloniality became a popular school of thought in academia, the Lords began exposing not just the political and the economic facts of colonialism, but its psychological effect, the colonized mentality first identified by Frantz Fanon. Our primitive political manifesto, written in 1972, entitled The Ideology of the Young Lords Party, expressed it best, and I quote: "We can only unchain our minds from the colonized mentality if we learn our true history, understand our culture, and work towards unity."
The Lords were also perhaps the first Latino political group in the United States whose leadership was primarily Black. And this rarely gets acknowledged. Of the six early members of our Central Committee, three were Afro-Puerto Rican: Felipe Luciano, Pablo "Yoruba" Guzmán and Juan "Fi" Ortiz. One was African American: Denise Oliver. And two were light-skinned Puerto Ricans: David Pérez and myself. More than 25% of our total membership was African American or Afro-Latino. Thus, our very existence directly challenged racial prejudice within our own communities.
In that 1972 manifesto, an essay by Denise Oliver eloquently explained what we referred to as the "non-conscious ideology" of racism among Latinos, one that had been instilled in us by colonialism. "We should not be afraid to criticize ourselves about racism," Denise wrote. "We are all racists, not because we want to be, but because we are taught to be that way, to keep us divided, because it benefits the capitalist system. And this applies to racism toward Asians, toward other Brown people, and toward white people. White people are not the oppressor — capitalists are. We will never have socialism until we are free of these chains on our mind." That was Denise Oliver in 1972.
Back then, we always distinguished between the individual racial biases imbued in us by colonialism and capitalism, what we referred to as "contradictions among the people," and the systematically racist policies of the society's major institutions, which we called "antagonistic contradictions" between classes. How different and clear that analysis is compared to all the claptrap we hear these days about diversity, equity and inclusion, with employee training sessions proliferating everywhere, that supposedly aim at rooting out anti-Black bias among individuals, but only result in confusion, mistrust and division among their participants, sessions run by so-called diversity consultants paid as much as $1,000 per hour by the very forces that perpetuate systemic racial and class oppression.
As a natural outgrowth of the Lords' analysis, we developed close and excellent working relationships with a variety of radical groups of that era, including the Panthers, the Republic of New Afrika, the Congress of African Peoples, I Wor Kuen, the Union of Democratic Filipinos, Students for a Democratic Society, the Revolutionary Union and the Young Patriots. And we were also founding members of the original Rainbow Coalition created by the late great Panther leader Fred Hampton. In short, we never sought to focus on what divides racial and ethnic groups, but instead to elevate what unites us.
After the Lords fell apart, many of us moved on to other movements and causes, but we always held fast to the slogan, "Unite the many to defeat the few." …
My references tonight to Fanon and Nkrumah and the evolution of class struggle among colonial peoples is for a reason. In the Young Lords, the colonial condition of our homeland was always central to our identity. Our iconic button featured a map of the island and the slogan, "Tengo Puerto Rico en mi corazón," "I have Puerto Rico in my heart." And an end to U.S. colonial control was a key plank of our program. The lessons of that for today are important to grasp.
Fifty years ago, we used to say that the Puerto Rican people were a divided nation, one-third of us living in the United States, and two-thirds in Puerto Rico. Today, those statistics have been dramatically reversed. Some 5.8 million Puerto Ricans now reside in the United States, while just 3.2 million reside on the island, according to the 2020 census. Five-eighths of our population, in other words, is now here. There are today four Puerto Ricans in Congress with a vote: Nydia Velázquez, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ritchie Torres from New York and Darren Soto from Central Florida. There is only one in Congress from the island, Resident Commissioner Jennifer González. She has no vote. The bulk of the political power of the Puerto Rican people, in other words, is now here in the United States.
All of these changes affect how activists and scholars approach the real-world solutions to Puerto Rico's colonial condition, especially in the wake of the debt crisis, PROMESA, Hurricane Maria, a series of earthquakes, all of which have combined to bring unprecedented calamity to the island's residents.
As I have urged repeatedly for years, there's an urgent need for more anti-imperialist scholars to dedicate themselves to analyzing how changes in the world capitalist economy have manifested themselves in Puerto Rico over the past 20 or 30 years. It is time we acknowledge that globalization has rendered historic concepts of national independence almost meaningless. You no longer need foreign armies to control the population, when you can read everyone's mail, tap everyone's phone, empty a country's coffers and paralyze its economy from afar through satellites, instant wire transfers and simple cancellations of bank credit lines. Today, small nations need more creative and flexible tactics to defend themselves from bullying by larger ones, to assert national sovereignty in an increasingly interdependent world. And Puerto Rican activists will never successfully tackle such problems with rote references to conditions 50 years ago.
I don't claim to have all the answers, only that we must work harder than ever to find solutions, and that we must never forget to ask what class interest is served by any solution. My observations tonight are not meant to needlessly cast fault on anyone, only to emphasize that the crucial test of our ideas and actions, no matter how high-sounding the words, comes in the crucible of popular struggle, especially if that struggle requires confrontation with the very institutions to which you belong or that employ you. That is how it was more than 50 years ago when I first became a Young Lord. And judging by the widespread youth rebellions across the nation, the Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights and climate change movements, that is how it will continue to be in the future, because all the accumulated knowledge and experience of radicals and progressives and revolutionaries mean nothing unless we draw the right lessons, unless they lead us to a freer, more just world, one where the fight against class oppression and empire remains at the center of everything we do.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan González, speaking at the CUNY Graduate Center. That's the City University of New York. His speech, "Latinos, Race and Empire." You can watch the full speech — actually, the trilogy of his speeches, all three of his farewell speeches, at democracynow.org.
